jfruhlinger writes: "Even Linux's most passionate partisans will admit that its filesystem, which stashes vital files in a variety of arcane directories, can be baffling to users. The developers at the Fedora project want to cut the Gordian know and consolidate all executables into/usr/bin and all libraries into/usr/lib or/usr/lib64. One downside: this system would conflict with the standards developed by the Linux Standard Base, or the (rarely used) Filesystem Hierarchy Standard."

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Back in the day I too did this but I placed everything into/bin and/sbin. It was all good and I could not work out why there needed many bin directories. I thought about this a lot and realized that the/bin/sbin directories contain just enough to get a system up/usr/bin and/usr/sbin contained the general "user" binaries. Why was it like this? Back in the day when hard disks were measured in MB instead of GB, a full unix system would not fix on a single hard disk. The root file system "/" was on one wh

It should be "knot" not "know". Editors may wish to correct this in the event of acceptance.

Observation: Tradition has it that/bin and/sbin should be capable of performing enough operations to recover a system in the event of a failure to mount a partition or in the event of a system compromise. These binaries should not be dynamically linked, for the same reasons. Tradition then states that anything else goes in/usr/bin and/usr/sbin -except- when/usr is shared, in which case anything that is local onl

The filesystem is very logical once you understand what it's about, and not difficult to get your head round at all.

If Fedora wants to make things simple for new users, perhaps it should just have a nice newbie-friendly 'tour' of the filesystem instead, as an option at first boot of a new system. In particular pay attention to the differences between typical installation, installation to/opt, and to/usr/local.

Changing the entire convention is bound to cause more trouble than it's worth, and users will not